The brain cartographer: May-Britt Moser is unlocking the secrets of our in-built GPS

May-Britt Moser charts the maps made by brains. In 2014, the neuroscientist won a joint Nobel Prize for her work on the 2005 discovery of grid cells, a population of neurons that enables us to understand precisely where we are in space. Based at the Centre for Neural Computation at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, she recalls the first time she saw the pattern the cells produce: "I thought, no, this isn't possible. This isn't biology – it's crazy!"

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What Moser was seeing was the way the cells fire in a grid-like pattern, which creates a neural map of the body's location. She made the discovery by placing electrodes in rats' brains, which enabled her to track individual grid cells as the animals moved - each time a rat passed certain points, a cell fired. As the subjects explored the territory available to them, clusters of cellular activity formed, which showed up in the recording as a hexagonal pattern - a visible proxy for how the brain charts physical space. "These clusters are separated so perfectly that you can fit an equilateral triangle [between them]," Moser explains. "It's such an extraordinary pattern." Multiple grid cells, each firing in different locations of the brain, create an intensely detailed chart of a space, and this assists the rats' navigation.

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Researchers have found grid cells in mice, monkeys, bats and humans - and now they're being used to study human disease. "[Understanding] the development of this pathway and how it's wired is also important for when things go wrong," Moser says. In her lab, she's looking at how grid cell circuits develop in the brain of newborn mice. "When it opens its eyes, around day 15, part of this positioning system is already there," Moser says. "How can biology create that?"

Moser credits an early interest with behaviour for her path into neuroscience. "One of my questions as a child was: 'What causes this animal or human to produce that behaviour?'" she says. "Being allowed to work on this question as an adult is fantastic."

Her latest research project – with colleague Christian Doeller – involves putting participants in an MRI scanner while wearing a VR headset that mimics movement, so the scanner can read neural activity that correlates with human grid cells. In subjects genetically predisposed to Alzheimer's, Doeller has discovered that this circuit is impaired: "That may in time provide an early diagnostic tool for predicting Alzheimer's," she says.

Moser will speak at the Starmus IV Festival in Norway in June. There, she will collaborate with a composer who has taken recordings from the brain cells of rats in her lab and turned them into music. "I hope people's curiosity is awakened," she says.

This article was first published in the June 2017 issue of WIRED magazine